ABSTRACT
The term weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) was, ironically, defined by the Report of the United Nations General Assembly’s Commission on Conventional Armaments in 1948 as
In doing so the commission made two clear distinctions: first between conventional arms on the one hand and WMDs on the other; and, second, between atomic (nuclear), chemical, and biological weapons. The commission’s definition also tacitly set apart atomic weapons as primus inter pares among WMDs and underlined a central role for the United Nations in managing them. Although traditional literature on the subject tends to club nuclear weapons, along with biological and chemical weapons, into a convenient but specious category of WMDs, this chapter will deliberately focus on these weapons separately for a number of reasons, which are explained in the first section.
